Staff file photo
Former Sheriff’s deputy Nathan Gastineau sits during his preliminary hearing in a San Bernardino Superior Courtroom December 15, 2011. Gastineau, 30, of Redlands, is charged with sexual acts with a teenaged female Explorer.

Notable court hearings in San Bernardino in the early months of 2014:

• Nathan Gastineau, the former San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy suspected of having sex with a teen police Explorer in 2010, is expected to start trial next week.

A readiness hearing is scheduled for Friday at the San Bernardino Superior Courthouse, according to court records. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday.

Authorities claim Gastineau, who had worked out of the sheriff’s Highland station, admitted to having sex with a teenage girl involved with the Explorer program.

He was arrested on April 22, 2011, on suspicion of having sex with the girl. Gastineau was charged about two months later with three counts of lewd acts with a child and three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse.

Gastineau, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, is free on bail.

• The West Covina man who pleaded guilty in December to six felony counts of murder, kidnapping and robbery in the 2008 execution-style slayings of a teen-age couple in an abandoned military bunker near Barstow is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 17 in Victorville Superior Court.

Under a plea agreement with San Bernardino County prosecutors, Collin Lee McGlaughlin, 24, will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

McGlaughlin was one of three people charged in the Jan. 5, 2008 slayings of Cody Thompson, 18, of Apple Valley, and Bodhisattva “Bodhi” Sherzer-Potter, 16, of Silver Lakes, in an abandoned Air Force bunker south of Highway 58, about 16 miles west of Barstow.

McGlaughlin and David Brian Smith, 25, of Covina, allegedly forced the couple at gunpoint from their vehicle and marched them into the bunker in the early hours of Jan. 5, 2008. Once inside the pitch-black bunker, McGlaughlin and Smith forced the couple onto the ground and shot them in their backs and heads with a shotgun and rifle.

Smith, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, still awaits trial. He next appears in court on March 21 for a pretrial hearing, according to court records.

A third defendant, Cameron Thomson, who was 15 years old at the time of killings, pleaded guilty in March 2011 to two counts of voluntary manslaughter as part of a plea bargain, according to court records. He agreed to testify against the other defendants in exchange for leniency.

• And John Wayne Thomson, the Washington man guilty of a brutal 2006 murder in the Cajon Pass and a violent crime spree in Victorville that followed, is scheduled to be sentenced in February.

Thomson was also convicted of second-degree robbery, aggravated mayhem, carjacking and two counts of attempted carjacking stemming from a crime spree in Victorville just a few days after Hedlund’s murder. Authorities said Thomson attacked a 70-year-old man with a hammer and stole his car then tried to steal cars from two women.